Quartz Obsession: Ejection seats

Quartz Obsession
Ejection seats
February 26, 2018
Flying high

Earlier this month, a Kenya Air Force F-5 jet crashed. The pilot survived with only minor injuries after ejecting himself from the aircraft and parachuting to the ground—making him the 7,560th person who has been saved by a Martin-Baker ejection seat.

The Middlesex, England-based company controls around 55% of the ejection-seat market, with more than 17,000 currently in service around the world. (Other big players include UTC Aerospace Systems of Charlotte, North Carolina and NPP Zvedza of Tomilino, Russia.)

Unless you’re a military pilot or have an interest in aircraft, it’s unlikely you’ve given the ejection seat much thought. But this marvel of engineering has changed the landscape of military flight in immeasurable ways since its advent around World War II.

The Kenyan pilot, and the 7,559 others who have successfully cheated death in a Martin-Baker seat, are eligible for free lifetime membership in the company’s Ejection Tie Club.

We talked to some of them to find out more.

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By the digits

10%: Proportion of Martin-Baker ejection seats that have saved a life

89.2% Crewmember survival rate for ejections

1-in-3: Number of ejectees who suffer spinal compression injuries

262–306: Miles per hour at which a person is ejected from the cockpit by an ejection seat

12–14: How many Gs a body is subjected to when ejecting

35,000: Search results for “pilot ejections” on YouTube

1961: The year Jimmy Fallon’s future father-in-law ejected from an F-8 Crusader

5: Number of days F-4 Phantom pilot J. Charles Plumb had left in his tour of duty when he successfully ejected over the Hanoi suburbs in a Martin-Baker Mk7 seat

2,103: Number of days Plumb subsequently spent in a Vietnamese prison camp

4,716: Plumb’s membership number in the Martin-Baker Ejection Tie Club
Brief history
The invention of ejection

1916: Railroad engineer and parachute inventor Everard Calthrop patented a primitive “Compressed Air Parachute Extraction System” after a friend—Charles Rolls, the “Rolls” in Rolls-Royce—died in a plane crash. This is widely considered to be a progenitor of the modern ejection seat.

1942: Test pilot Helmut Schenk becomes the first person to escape from a stricken aircraft by using an ejection seat.

1942: The Heinkel He 219 Uhu night fighter is the first operational plane to provide ejection seats for its crew.

1943: A gunpowder ejection seat was developed and trialled in a Saab aircraft.

1944: A new type of ejection seat powered by an explosive cartridge is featured on a new Heinkel aircraft.

1950: The US Air Force tests the ejection seats in the B-58 Hustler bomber by strapping in drugged-up bears.

1958: The first aircraft is fitted with a rocket-propelled seat.

1968: Neil Armstrong ejects from the Lunar Lander Research Vehicle.

1995: The first helicopter with an ejection seat enters service in Russia.
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Quotable
“An ejection seat is kind of a nightmarish, Rube Goldberg-looking machine, and it still astounds me to this day that mine worked the way it did.”

— Cmdr. Stanton Parsons, Martin-Baker ejectee number 4344

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Nuts and bolts
How does an ejection seat work?

Modern ejection seats are powered by explosive charges or rocket motors. Here’s what happens when a pilot pulls the ejection handle:

    The cockpit canopy is jettisoned as an explosive cartridge under the seat sends it up an angled guide rail, while a series of restraints tighten around the pilot’s body.
    An underseat rocket motor fires, lifting the pilot 200 or so additional feet into the air in order to prevent a collision with the plane’s tail.
    A drogue parachute deploys, stabilizing the seat and pilot, who is still strapped in at this stage.
    A sensor automatically deploys the pilot’s main parachute, but only at 10,000 feet or below, where the air is breathable. The drogue detaches from the seat.
    The seat now detaches from the pilot, whose parachute opens. Once the chute is open, a motor separates seat and pilot, who can now land.

If the system is working as it should, this has all has taken place in less than two seconds.

Ejection seat historian and collector Kevin Coyne says such a complex sequence of events taking place over such a short period of time presents “a level of liability that is unique in the engineering field.”

“That one time it has to be used, it has to fire,” Coyne tells Quartz. “The only technology even close to that is airbags, and airbags are a lot less complicated.”

So, having ejected from the airplane… what happens next? This Popular Mechanics explainer gets into the details.
Industry hazards
The not-so-fun facts

Let’s be clear: While “ejection seat” rides have turned up in amusement parks in recent years, there’s really nothing fun about ejecting from an actual jet.

“Viewed from the perspective that the metal and rivets of the 50,000-pound Phantom must be inspected for structural damage after 9 Gs, there is little wonder that the frailty of human muscle and bones are subject to injury when ejected at forces of 12-14 Gs,” Dr. Guy Clark, a former US Navy flight surgeon and F-4C Phantom crewman, wrote in his 2017 memoir.

As a 1991 study published in the Archives of Emergency Medicine instructed, “All ejectees should be considered to have a spinal fracture until proven otherwise radiographically.” Other alarming ejection-related injuries include “gross posterior soft tissue disruption,” “upper limb flail injury,” and burns.

“It’s a desperation measure just to survive,” Clark tells Quartz.

And accidents still happen: Just last month, Martin-Baker admitted breaching safety law over a defective design that killed a pilot in 2011.

There’s no doubt ejecting is incredibly risky in the best of circumstances, and only a last resort when catastrophe is imminent—but there are stories with happy endings. “I remember one or two pilots who had ejected two, maybe three times,” Clark says. “They were sent home because the squadron commander thought they’d had enough war, but they did not suffer any spinal injury.”
Explainer
So, uh... what’s with the tie?

As Martin-Baker explains on its website: “The primary objective of the Club is to provide a distinctive tie to be worn with civilian clothing which provides a visible sign of the members’ common bond… All Tie Club memorabilia depicts a red triangle warning sign, the recognised international danger symbol for an ejection seat.”

If you are (un)lucky enough to find yourself eligible for membership in Martin-Baker’s club, they’ll invite you to a ceremony in England to present you with your tie. However, you’re not under any obligation to attend.

Retired US Navy pilot Charlie Plumb, who ejected in Hanoi and was imprisoned during the Vietnam War, told Quartz: “It was probably 15 years after I was repatriated that I got this letter from Martin-Baker that said, Hey, are you the guy who used our ejection seat? We want to invite you to England and celebrate and give you a tie and a pin to wear and all this stuff. I said, Thank you very much, the seat worked fine, but I don’t have any real plans to be in Europe for a while. Send me the tie. So, there was no pomp and circumstance to me getting the tie; I got it in the mail.”

USMC fighter pilot Errett “EJ” Bozarth ejected from an F-4J Phantom II on January 3, 1976, and has several friends in the Ejection Tie Club including six other members from his squadron. When Bozarth’s original tie wore out, Martin-Baker sent him a replacement, he told Quartz.
Person of interest
The first lady

The first female aviator inducted into the Martin-Baker Ejection Tie Club was Lt. Linda Maloney, ejectee number 4346, a US Navy flight officer who punched her way out of a Grumman EA-6A “Electric Intruder” during a training run on February 11, 1991. Instead of a tie, Martin-Baker gave her a silver necklace with a little ejection seat hanging from it.

Cmdr. Stanton Parsons, Martin-Baker ejectee number 4344, was at the controls of Maloney’s aircraft that day.

“The airplane was radically out of control and it was all I could do to pull the handle to get out of it,” they told us. “We went into the ocean; we ended up about ten miles apart, we were rescued by two different helicopters. We were in the water for about an hour. It was freezing cold; each of us had a pretty good case of hypothermia going.”

Parsons also got a tie, but doesn’t wear it. (His wife framed it.)
Take me down this 🐰hole

An ejection accident costs the character “Goose” his life in the 1986 film Top Gun. Could such an event actually happen? Aviation internet investigates.
Pop Quiz
What is the fastest speed at which someone has survived an ejection from a fighter plane?
1,200 mph
780 mph, or Mach 1.01
900 mph
660 mph
If your inbox doesn’t support this quiz, find the solution at bottom of email.
watch this!

James Bond makes use cunning use of an ejector seat in Goldfinger.
Million-dollar question
How much does an ejection seat cost?

A new Martin-Baker ejection seat runs in the neighborhood of $140,000-$420,000. A usable UTC Aerospace ACES II ejection seat—which has been installed (and replaced by the ACES 5) in the A-10, F-15, F-16, F-22, B-1, and B-2—runs somewhere in the quarter-million dollar range.

Much of the cost of an operational seat comes from the explosive charges used to propel it into the air, according to Kevin Coyne, who has eight ejection seats in his collection, in various states of repair. Minus the explosives, which must be replaced every 10 years, “the basic seat is probably about $60,000,” he says.

Purely decorative units for use as desk chairs or home furnishings are slightly more affordable, with a decommissioned Martin-Baker seat going for $19,500. (“Not for Flight Use,” says the listing.)

“If someone has restored a seat, it should not have any active cartridges on it, but even so, a seat should be treated like a firearm,” Coyne cautions on his website. “If you don’t know the situation, treat it as if it were loaded.”
poll
Have you ever parachuted out of a plane?
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The fine print

In last week’s poll about the Rubik’s Cube, 53% of you said “It’s all a big puzzle, isn’t it?” 🤔

Today’s email was written by Justin Rohrlich, edited by Jessanne Collins, and produced by Quincey Tickner.

Images: Wikimedia Commons/US Navy National Museum of Naval Aviation (airplane eject seat), Wikimedia Commons/US Navy National Museum of Naval Aviation (moving ejection seat), Bill Abbott/Flickr (ejection seat diagram), Wikimedia Commons/US Navy Naval Museum of Armament and Technology (ejection seat progression), Reuters/Joseph Okanga (skydiver)
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